Bookshelf: Derek Conrad Murray

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Some books are new discoveries; others are books to which I find myself returning often. All of them help me think on the new trajectories of my research in black visuality, particularly the representation of blackness as it intersects with queerness.

My Reading List:

John D’Emelio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003)

David Kaufmann, Telling Stories: Philip Guston’s Later Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010)

Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)

Derek Conrad Murray is an interdisciplinary theorist specializing in the history, theory, and criticism of contemporary art, African-American and African Diaspora art and culture, Post-Black art and aesthetics, theoretical approaches to identity and representation, critical issues in art practice, and the methodologies and ethics of art history and visual studies. He has contributed to leading magazines and journals of contemporary art and visual culture such as American Art, Art in America, Parachute, Art Journal, Third Text, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (Duke University Press), where he currently serves as associate editor. Murray is also a member of the editorial advisory board of Third Text. Murray’s most recent article “Notes to Self: The Visual Culture of ‘Selfies’ in the Age of Social Media,” was published in Summer 2015 in Consumption Markets & Culture. Murray is the author of Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015).